You can turn one onion into many onions and it is possibly the easiest way to grow onions. To use this method you will need only one thing and that is an onion that is ready to be eaten.
Start by chopping off the bottom 1/3 of your onion. The top half you will eat. The bottom half you will turn into more onions. Your onion I should point out should have at least a little bit of root still intact.
Allow the onion to rest overnight.
Some people skip the next step, but I believe it helps with success rate. Place the onion bottom over water such that the bottom portion of the onion is submerged in water. Do not allow the water to cover the onion or it will fail every time.
Keep the onion bottom like this for about a week. The roots should have now started growing and there should be some green shoots emerging from the top of the onion.
At this point it is time to plant. Place the onion bottom with its green shoots up and the roots down and cover with soil. Do not cover completely. The top of the onion can be below the level of the soil, but do not push the soil over the top of the onion.
Onions have shallow roots so you will always need to pay attention and not let the soil around the onion dry out for too long. However, make sure that onions recieve good sunlight so that they can produce their own food and not rely on the onion bottom because it has only a limited amount of food it can supply.
After about 40 days you should have lots of tall green leaves. You can actually harvest those as green onions now if you wish. However, this article is about onion BULBS. Full-size. So at about the 40 day mark you need to dig up your onions and separate them into individual onions. Each division should contain some of the bulb and some root material too. You might get anywhere from 10 to 25 individual onion plants at this point.
Replant these divided onion so that they have enough space to grow unhindered by the cluster of competitors that they had before division. It is OK to use a knife during the division process if needed.
If a the onions are to difficult to seperate or if just a section of the onion cluster is too difficult to seperate then simply replant them and wait another week or even more before trying again.
After another couple of months or so the onions will hopefully be large enough to harvest. Times are not exact and it depends onion the variety of onion and the growing conditions experienced.
That is it. You know know how to grow multiple onions from a single onion bottom.
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